


Can't Do It Anymore

by LibKat



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Canon Incest, F/M, Not a happy J/B ending, Why do these two bring out the angst in me?, not cersei friendly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-16
Updated: 2018-04-16
Packaged: 2019-04-23 21:33:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14341356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LibKat/pseuds/LibKat
Summary: Brienne is done.





	Can't Do It Anymore

**Author's Note:**

> WARNING: THIS DOES NOT END HAPPILY. If you don't read angst, don't put yourself through this.
> 
> This was a small fic I just had to get out of my mind so I could go back to my fluffier WIPs. It was instigated by NCW's interviews where he compares Jaime's relationship with Cersei to an addiction.
> 
> Disclaimer: A Song of Ice and Fire, Game of Thrones and these characters belong to a whole bunch of people who are not me. I will return them undamaged when I am finished playing with them.

 

_Why did I even answer the door?  I knew what I was going to find._

Brienne Tarth sat on her old, comfy sofa and tried to look relaxed.  She tried to look like her mind wasn’t screaming “Danger, Will Robinson, DANGER!!!!”

She’d suspected what was happening when he’d canceled movie night on Friday.  She’d been sure when he’d then gone incommunicado for three days.  For the last eighteen months it had been unusual for her not to hear from him for even three hours. 

She’d tried briefly to reassure herself that he wouldn’t.  He’d come so far, fought so hard.  He knew better.  Yet there he was, leaning against her bookcase, trying to appear nonchalant.  But his arms were crossed tightly over his chest, his head was tipped back just the tiniest bit, and the look was back in his green eyes.  The look that said “I am a Lannister and you are not.  I am lion and you are sheep.”

Gods, she hated seeing that look more than anything.  And being a huge, mannish, ugly woman Brienne had been on the receiving end of a lot of unpleasant looks in the course of her life.

“I know you don’t approve, Brienne.  I know you won’t be pleased about this.  But I’m asking you to accept that I’m doing what I need to do to make myself happy, to feel complete.  You’re my best friend.  I need you to understand.”

It was kind of sad that she truly was his best friend.  Jaime had looks, money, charm and social position.  Brienne had none of those things.  But whenever one of them needed a hand or a shoulder, they turned to each other first.  Most people looked at them and judged that Brienne had to be getting more out of their friendship than Jaime.  They couldn’t have been more wrong.

***

They met about seven years before, not too long after Brienne moved to Kings Landing.  Settling into her dream job as a sci-fi/fantasy editor at Shining Knight Press kept her practically chained to her desk for her first six months in the new city.  But when the spring came she knew she needed more in her life than going to work, the gym and then home to read manuscripts into the wee hours.  Running and PX90 to stay in shape just wasn’t cutting it for her.  She was a jock and she needed to compete.  Through a coworker, Brienne got a tryout for one of the best baseball teams in the city parks league.

In the Stormlands, Brienne had been as rare and sought after as dragon’s eggs, a good pitcher who could also hit with power.  She expected to sail through the tryout.  She hadn’t counted on the team’s captain, who was also the catcher.

Jaime Lannister had been very close to a major league level player in his youth.  At Lannisport U he led the team, which had a barely .500 record before he got there, to the college playoffs three years in a row.  It was rumored he’d been scouted by all the pro franchises.  They’d been waving sweetheart deals at him, with guarantees of starting on one of the top minor league teams in Essos, and up to the majors within two years.  Then, inexplicably, he withdrew from the pro draft to go to law school.  The last few years he’d satisfied himself with being the king of the KL amateur leagues.

Jaime had taken one look at Brienne, in her beat up Storm’s End Cyclones gear and started trash talking.

Did her monstrous size frighten the batters into striking out?  Did her face distract them so much that they couldn’t see the ball coming at them?

That was only the beginning, while she stretched out and then jogged onto the field.  But Brienne wasn’t a painfully shy teenager anymore.  She didn’t have to take that crap.  She stepped up on the pitcher’s mound.  The loudmouth asshole was already in his catcher’s gear and behind home plate, expecting a few easy warm up pitches.  So Brienne went into her windup, then let it fly.

The asshole was quick, she’d give him that.  He bent his knees, dropped his butt and got his glove up in time for her fastball to hit the sweet spot with a solid thunk.

“Shit.”  She heard the asshole whisper.

Brienne shook her shoulder to relax her arm.  Then she gave him the finger and stalked off.

“Hey, uh, Stretch!  Hold up.”  She heard him call behind her.  She did not stop.

Word got around that a tall tow head had stood up to Jaime Lannister.  Brienne quickly got offered a spot on another team in the league.  They played Jaime’s team twice that season.  Though they didn’t manage to win either time, it was a lot closer than anyone expected.  Brienne was especially pleased that Jaime only got two singles off her and she struck him out three times.

At the league’s end of the season barbecue blowout, Jaime didn’t quite apologize to her, but his sniping was milder, more friendly and allowed Brienne to give as good as she got. 

They ran into one another a couple times in the weeks that followed.  That led to going for coffee and discovering they had a lot of common interests.  Impressed with her conditioning, Jaime joined the same gym and started PX90 with her trainer.  When the next season came around, her old team had lost interest and disbanded.  Brienne became the pitcher for the Golden Lions.  Slowly but surely she and Jaime became friends.

***

They spent another year keeping things casual, drinks with teammates after a game, a protein shake at the juice bar in their gym, coffee and a ride home after a workout.  They started meeting up to run on Sunday mornings and then hitting one of the food trucks in the park for breakfast.  Meeting up at a sports bar near one of their offices if there was a good game on that night.  They chatted about neutral topics at first and then they talked about their lives and then they opened up the important stuff.

After running into one of her tormentors from high school, Brienne told Jaime the whole humiliating story of the bet on her virginity.

When she tried to get him interested in one of her favorite fantasy authors, he told her about his dyslexia, about his father’s unrelenting criticism of him for this “defect”.

She cried on his shoulder when a blind date left her sitting in a restaurant, with a rose thrown on the floor at her feet.

He vented about the unrelenting tension between his father and his younger brother and how he always felt caught up in the war between them.

Brienne could tell that there was someone significant in his life, romantically speaking.  He’d cancel sometimes on short notice.  Or he’d show up late, with “Just Been Fucked” practically tattooed on his forehead.  Brienne asked a couple times about his lover but he always denied it.  His moods swung unpredictably, the way Brienne remembered in her college roommates when some asshole boyfriend was keeping them deliberately off balance.  He’d be tense, even though they’d obviously just been together.  He’d be be relaxed and jovial when he hadn’t seen his lover for days. Or vice versa.  One thing was certain.  He’d be just a little bit mean when he was meeting his lover regularly.

Jaime’s behavior gradually began to worsen.  It was just after his sister’s second wedding.  Sometimes he railed against his twin for choosing “that sleazy horn dog of a Dornishman”.  Sometimes his father was the object of his ire, for pressuring her into another business transaction masquerading as a marriage.  Sometimes he just sat, angry and uncommunicative, no matter how Brienne approached him to try and get him to open up.

Jaime started drinking.  He was a lightweight and it didn’t take much for him to become sloppy drunk.  Brienne had to put him to bed on her couch more than once as that year went on.  She’d see bruises and scratches, even burns on his body when they worked out.  They weren’t the kind of injuries that came from hot, enjoyable sex.  They were … vicious.

She tried to talk to his brother about it, but Tyrion threw up his hands and told her not to pound her head against that brick wall.

Brienne confronted him.  This was affecting his health, affecting his job, affecting their friendship.  He was abusing himself and he was being abused.  If he wouldn’t talk to her he had to talk to someone.

At first Jaime came out swinging.  Comments on her looks, her brains, her history that she had shared with him.  She’d read up on interventions.  She stood firm and took it all.

But she couldn’t stop the tears from welling up in her eyes.

That stopped Jaime in his tracks.  He dropped to her sofa, his head in his hands.  He begged for her forgiveness.  And then he talked.  The whole ugly story.

They’d started fooling around even before puberty.  They celebrated their thirteenth birthday with losing their virginity together.  Their adolescence was one long charade of appearing to be the perfect siblings while seeking every opportunity to screw.  

He chose Lannisport for college over some powerhouse universities with great baseball traditions, because she could get accepted there.  He dropped out of the pro draft when she begged him not to leave her and promised they’d work out a way to be together.  He enrolled in the same law school and, even with his dyslexia, he did most of her assignments to keep her from flunking out, while his own grades suffered.  In their second year, she became engaged to another student from a prominent political family, hand picked by their father.  Soon, she’d convinced Jaime to “help with” Robert’s classwork as well.  At graduation, just before Cersei and Robert’s big society wedding, Jaime tried to break away from her.  He decided to accept a job offer from a small public interest practice in the North over joining the Lannister family firm.  Then Cersei announced she was pregnant, a baby that she privately assured him was his.  A baby she "lost" two months later, with her husband loudly expressing his doubts that she'd ever been pregnant at all.

Every decision he’d made for as long as he could remember had been for her benefit, not his own.  He’d only ever been with her.  He’d only ever wanted to be with her.  He’d do whatever he had to do to stay in her life, to get whatever crumbs of affection Cersei was willing to toss at him.

Brienne didn’t really know what to do with his confession.  The idea of having a decades long affair with his twin was repugnant.  But he was Jaime, the best friend she’d ever had.  She’d fallen into and back out of love with him so many times since they met that she’d lost count.

She could almost understand why the twins had turned to one another as children.  Their father was cold, distant and disapproving.  They were isolated from most other children as being unworthy of association with Lannisters.  But she couldn’t comprehend why Jaime stayed so long, held on so hard to a relationship that was obviously harming him.  Eventually she came to the conclusion that there was little difference between his behavior and women who stayed with abusive husbands.  He was so enmeshed in the cycle of need and abuse that he couldn’t see a way to break free, even during the times when he realized he wanted to, deserved to.

The fact that they both worked at the Lannister law firm, lived in the same Lannister owned condo complex, vacationed as a family at the Lannister summer “cottage” on the Sunset Sea, made it difficult for Jaime to get any distance to consider his circumstances away from Cersei’s influence.

He needed more help than Brienne could give him, for the drinking even if he wasn’t willing to confront his other issues.  When he passed out during a ballgame and had to be taken to the ER, he agreed to get some therapy, join a support group.  Brienne was finally hopeful that he might stop slowly killing himself before her eyes.

A period of one step forward, two steps back followed.  Every time he made a little progress, something would happen to pull him back to Cersei.  Her second marriage imploded spectacularly on the pages of every tabloid in the country.  She insisted on being first chair in a major court case and fucked it up royally, needing Jaime to cover up her mistakes and again do her work as well as his own.  She acquired a “stalker” and needed her brother’s support and protection.

Cersei also began to put herself in Brienne’s path: coming to watch their baseball games, joining their gym, showing up where Brienne got her morning latte or at the book club she led at the public library.  It was creepy.  Brienne felt like she was the one being stalked sometimes.  At first Jaime blew it off as coincidence.  Then he was actually pleased that his “two favorite women” were getting to know one another. He never noticed the hate filled looks or insulting comments Cersei constantly aimed at Brienne.

Then, two years ago, Cersei hired someone to attack Brienne and take her out of Jaime’s life.  Thankfully, she used one of the law firm’s shadier clients to do the job and he subcontracted out to a couple of losers who never expected a woman to know how to fight back.  Though the police were never able to trace the whole thing back to Cersei, Jaime realized who was responsible and it finally opened his eyes to who his sweet sister had become, or maybe always was.

Jaime finally made a clean break, taking a “sabbatical” and checking himself into a way off the grid psychiatric clinic in Sothyros.   Nobody there knew or cared that he was Jaime Lannister of the Casterly Lannisters.  They only cared that he was a fucked up guy who needed help.

Brienne missed him like crazy while he was gone.  When Jaime was able to make contact with outside world, she started getting letters, then phone calls, then vid chats.  She and his brother were the only people he was in contact with.  Even so, Brienne was stunned when she was invited to “family” week at the clinic along with Tyrion, so Jaime could clear the air with his nearest and dearest while still under constant supervision, in case something happened to cause a setback.

When he came back to Kings Landing, it really seemed like he had turned a corner.  They spent over a year free of the ominous cloud that was Cersei.  There was a light to Jaime that was breathtaking to see.

And then it started to dim.

***

“Aren’t you going to say anything, Stretch?”

Brienne had been silent for a long moment and stayed that way for a long moment more.  This was going to be maybe the hardest thing she had ever done.

“I do understand how this happened Jaime.  The sudden client crises, reviving the Sunday family dinners, starting the law firm softball team.  She’s been worming her way back into your life for weeks.  What I don’t understand is how you can forget what she did to you.  What she tried to do to me.”

“That was a misunderstanding, Brienne.  We really got the wrong end of the stick there.  Let me explain.”

“No.”

“What do you mean ‘no’?”

“I mean no, I don’t want to hear whatever bullshit she fed you while you were balls deep in her cunt.”

“You won’t even give her a fair hearing?  She was right.  You’re jealous of her, of what we have.”

“I gave up being jealous over you a long time ago, Jaime.  Now I’m just … sad.”

Sad and angry and more than a bit disgusted.  It was the disgust that was the hardest to accept.  As appalling as the whole twincest thing had been, she’d never felt disgusted by Jaime.

“You say you need her to be happy.  Okay.  You’ve been the happiest I’ve ever seen you since you got back from rehab, but okay.  Maybe I was seeing what I wanted to see.  You do what you need to do.  And I’ll do what I need to do.”

Jaime looked wary.  “What does that mean?”

“Don’t worry.  I’m not talking about going to the tabloids or tattling to your father.  You’re a grown man.  What you do to yourself is your business.  But I don’t have to watch it.”

“C’mon, Brienne.  We were friends before when Cers and I were together.  We can just go back to that.”

“No, we can’t.  The ugly truth we’ve both been trying to avoid acknowledging for years is that you’re a junkie, Jaime.  Cersei is your drug.  And she’ll be the death of you as surely as heroin would.  The only rational thing to do about a junkie who won’t stay clean is to cut them out of your life.”

“What the fuck?  Are you kidding me?  I’m in love and you can’t take it.  This is your problem Brienne, not mine.”

“I remember what I learned in Sothyros.  Do you?  You keep doing the same harmful thing but expecting a different result.  It’s the definition of an addict, Jaime.  And I can’t keep enabling you in your self destruction.  Nothing you can say could change my mind.  I don’t believe in you anymore.”

Jaime stood silent and stunned.

Brienne rose and picked up the box she had stashed behind her sofa.  It was filled to overflowing with stuff Jaime had left at her house over the years.  On top was the spare key to his condo that he’d given her when he’d come back from rehab.

“When did you pack this?”  Jaime whispered, tears in his eyes.

“I started when you cancelled on movie night.”

“Oh.”  Jaime reached out to take the box from Brienne, then dropped his hands.  “Wait.  Let me give you back your house key.”

“Don’t bother.  I’ve already had the locks changed.  Cersei had access to your key ring all weekend.  I’m not taking the chance that I’ll wake up some night and find one of her clients with a knife at my throat.  She might manage to hire somebody competent this time.”

“Okay.”  Jaime put the box under his arm.  “I guess that’s it then.  I’ll miss you, Brienne.  I’m sorry … I’m sorry it ended up this way.”

“I know you are.  I’d ask you not to let her hurt you again, but I can see the scratches on your neck.  You deserve better, Jaime.  You’re a good man.  I wish you could see that.”

After he left, Brienne leaned against her front door for a long time, trying to keep her breathing even.  Then she headed into her bedroom and put on her sneakers.  She needed to run.  
 

 

 


End file.
